Sometimes we just get too much of a good thing. Like the 6 hours of raking leaves this weekend. The complaints that airport screening has become too intrusive. Or the pictures of Prince William's engagement.

And that's how I've felt lately about Cloud. How many more presentations and articles do we really need to see on this important topic?

So what an amazing thing to be able to recommend a very cool new cloud presentation. Cool because it goes beyond the usual cloud definitions. The presentation from my colleague Pam Isom, Executive Enterprise Architect at IBM Global Business Services, was given at The Open Group's conference in Amsterdam last month. Pam provides:

Real-life business and technology outcomes of using Cloud in the enterprise

The significance of the Business Architect and Cloud

Practical guidance

Feel free to contact Pam for more information at pisom@us.ibm.com. And let us know if you find the presentation useful. Or have any more examples of too much of a good thing.

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The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

Joe Jakubowski, Virtualization Performance Lead Engineer, and Nancy Reaves, Offering and Alliance Manager, recently gave an excellent talk on understanding virtualization benchmarks. Here is what you need to know:

As we know, benchmarks are only one of many ways to evaluate systems. Performance is one component - don't forget to consider reliability features, memory capacity/scalability, I/O, and manageability when selecting a virtualization solution.

Virtualization performance (and performance in general) is not just a function of transaction throughput. It is also important to analyze response time.

When comparing virtualization benchmark results, it is important to compare like builds and like configurations to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Often a gap in results can be attributed to the hypervisor build. The Build Number can be found in the benchmark disclosure report.

SPECvirt_sc2010 is the industry-standard single-host virtualization benchmark for all systems, including x86 servers. This benchmark has many enhancements including:

TPC-C is a benchmark that some of us love to hate. It's too old, it's too big, it takes so many resources. But in the end, TPC-C is great to have as a proof point, with all of the detailed performance data behind it.

IBM published an outstanding TPC-C result today on an x3850 X5 system. The IBM result was 27% greater than HP's top DL580 result and the highest ever x86-64 score (1). IBM's eX5 result used MAX5, an industry-first technology that decouples memory from the processor allowing for the unique capability to expand memory independently of the processor to increase the productivity of a single system.

The TPC-C benchmark simulates an order-entry environment of a wholesale supplier -- entering and delivering orders, recording payments, checking the status of orders, and monitoring the level of stock at the warehouses. What's so valuable here is that TPC-C represents truly any industry that must manage, sell, or distribute a product or service.

So whatever business we are in, we can take any of our industry applications to the MAX.

On Saturday, I spent two hours raking leaves. It was a perfect afternoon. Sunny, warm, no wind. It almost made you glad to be raking leaves on a Saturday afternoon.

What a sense of accomplishment as you get that leaf pile to rise higher and higher. Sometimes you think there's just no way even one more leaf can be placed on top. And then you heave a smaller pile onto the large pile and somehow it actually stays.

IBM's leaf pile has also been reaching new heights in the just released TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

IBM once again had the most installed aggregate throughput with over 12,093 out of 43,654 Teraflops. IBM has had the lead for 23 lists in a row.

IBM had the most systems with 200. HP had 160, Cray had 29, SGI had 22. Oh, and Oracle? Oracle had 11.

IBM had the most energy-efficient system as well as the most energy-efficient x86-only cluster. And IBM clearly dominated the top 25 most energy efficient systems overall.

And for even more top news, IBM today just published another #1 SAP SD 2-tier benchmark result, the highest result ever, on the IBM Power 795 (1). Read more here.

On Saturday afternoon, I sat down and lovingly looked over my impressive 3 foot piles of leaves. What an awesome sight. What an amazing accomplishment and so wonderful that with this job you can actually see the results, firsthand and right away. Then something caught my eye. My neighbor has a gorgeous maple that towers above every other tree on the block. The leaves were flaming before me, the color of a sunset on Fire Island. But then it hit me. They were still very much on the tree. And I realized that we've only just begun.

Sources: http://www.sap.com/benchmark, http://www.top500.org. Results current as of 11/15/10.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respective
logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all
over the world.

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.